This paper describes the operating mode of the two existing Belgian fiscal councils as well as their role in the budgetary planning process. These institutions, created or reformed in depth in a context of large public deficits and increasing public debt-to-GDP ratios coupled with the...

It is not uncommon to observe the published forecasts of economic commentators closely bunched together over long periods of time. In our case, the phenomenon is observed for eight national panels of economists who report monthly forecasts. A framework is developed that conveniently nests within...

It is standard in applied work to select forecasting models by ranking candidate models by their prediction mean squared error (PMSE) in simulated out-of-sample (SOOS) forecasts. Alternatively, forecast models may be selected using information criteria (IC). We compare the asymptotic and...

ABSTRACT. We use a dynamic factor model proposed by Stock and Watson [1998, 1999,2002a,b] to forecast Colombian inflation. The model includes 92 monthly series observedover the period 1999:01-2008:06. The results show that for short-run horizons, factor modelforecasts significantly outperformed...

Pepper is an important agriculture commodity especially for the state of Sarawak. It is important to forecast its price, as this could help the policy makers in coming up with production and marketing plan to improve the Sarawak’s economy as well as the farmers’welfare. In this paper, we...

This article is concerned with forecasting from nonlinear conditional mean models. First, a number of often applied nonlinear conditional mean models are introduced and their main properties discussed. The next section is devoted to techniques of building nonlinear models. Ways of computing...

This paper presents evidence linking in-sample tests of predictive content and out-of-sample forecast accuracy. Our approach focuses on the negative effect that finite-sample estimation error has on forecast accuracy despite the presence of significant population-level predictive content. We...

We propose and explore several related ways of reducing reliance of point forecast accuracy evaluation on expected loss, E(L(e)), where e is forecast error. Our central approach dispenses with the loss function entirely, instead using a \stochastic error divergence" (SED) accuracy measure based...

The accuracy of macroeconomic forecast depends on various factors, most importantly the mix of analytical methods used by the individual forecasters, the way that their personal experience is shaping their identification strategies, but also their efficiency in translating new information into...

In There is evidence that exponential smoothing methods as well as time varying parameter models perform relatively well in forecasting comparisons. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new forecasting technique by integrating the exponential smoothing model with regressors whose coefficients...